


Proximity

by bio_at



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Gen, kind of, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 18:34:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1097282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bio_at/pseuds/bio_at
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Lucy tries to stay away, with varying degrees of success.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proximity

**Author's Note:**

> Because attempted emotional distance is so my thing. Not.

1.

It’s been two days since he started the Animus session. Only two days of carefully monitored exposure to the Animus, and he’s already pale and clammy when she pulls him out. Or at least, she thinks so.

“No doctor today?” Desmond asks happily, looking around.

“Meeting,” Lucy answers briefly, checking his vitals. “You look alright… mostly. A little bit of weird brain activity. What year is it?”

“11-something something,” he says nonchalantly, and Lucy’s head snaps up in alarm to see him smirking. “I’m kidding, kidding! It’s 2012.”

“Don’t,” she snarls, and she hates how hurt she sounds. “Don’t joke like that.” She gathers up her things to leave, but a hand on her arm makes her turn around.

“Hey, I’m sorry, okay? Why are you so upset about me getting dates wrong?”

She thinks of Clay—a happy, healthy Clay, his snark and easy laughter, and wonders what Desmond’s sounded like. She’s quiet for a little too long, and Desmond’s voice is softer when he speaks next.

“You don’t have to tell me all at once, you know.” He moves over on the Animus, indiscreetly patting the space beside him, and she immediately regrets her hostility.

Lucy risks a glance at the security camera, and looks back at Desmond, managing a sad smile. “Maybe another time.”

She turns away from Desmond’s slightly dejected face to leave.

 

2.

The loud beeping noise would have irritated her had it not meant that Desmond was in danger.

She walks over to the Animus, where Desmond has his eyes screwed up, with low, throaty sounds coming from him. This is a regular enough occurrence in the warehouse that Shaun only winces without turning around, and Rebecca just sighs and types a little bit faster, working to relieve some of Desmond’s pain. Lucy still isn’t used to it, though; she never was.

Rebecca ignores her as she hovers over him worriedly; Lucy had never been one who could ignore someone screaming in pain in the same room as her. Lucy glances over his face, which is dripping with sweat and screwed in agony, and wipes his face with a cloth she brought over. She fixates on the scar on his lips, remembers how it moves with his mouth when he laughs.

“You sure you don’t want to go out?” Rebecca says into the mic that’s linked to Desmond’s headpiece.

He jerks his head no, then struggles to take a deep breath. “G… give m-me a few m-minutes…”

He twitches his arm, and Lucy looks down to see her hand on it. She doesn’t remember putting it there. Desmond jerks his head no again when she takes it away reflexively; she’s not sure if that was for her or something in the Animus.

“He’s just left the white room,” Rebecca says softly. Lucy runs her fingers lightly over his hidden blade one last time, and returns to her station.

 

3.

Desmond is taking more and more nightly walks through Monteriggioni, and Lucy has to pretend she doesn’t hear him talking to himself up on the roof. She assumes he’s talking to Ezio, and she finds it kind of cute, really, because they get along so well—as far as she can tell, because he’s speaking in fluent Italian.

Which isn’t supposed to happen. The Animus translates everything into English for him; it seems more than Ezio’s skill is Bleeding into Desmond. She wonders how much else.

_Too much_ , she immediately thinks, too much for his body to handle. He’s started to yell in his sleep, sometimes small, low groans of pain and sometimes bloodcurdling screams that bounce off the walls, at which she can _swear_ she sees the statue of Altair grimace at his descendant’s discomfort.

“You can come out,” Desmond calls out into the night, and Lucy tenses up. “Come on, Lucy. You’re the only one who can get up here aside from me.”

“Shaun probably could if he tried,” she mutters, and gets up on the roof next to him.

Comfortable silence passes between them; the area around Monteriggioni is dark and the sky looks gorgeous. It’s windy up here, too, and Lucy eyes Desmond’s thick jacket compared to her leather one.

“You must think I’m crazy,” he starts, and Lucy has to think, _where have I heard that before?_ “Talking to visions in my head.”

“I don’t think they’re visions if they talk to you,” she muses. “They’re part of you, always with you.”

“You were the one who said it was unhealthy to interact with my _visions_.”

“The Bleeding Effect is unhealthy only if you lose your sense of self,” she says flatly. “From what I heard, you were talking to Ezio like a separate being.”

“He is,” Desmond says fondly, and Lucy can’t help but smile.

“What were you talking about?”

“Free-running… he was telling me about the time Rosa taught him to climb leap.”

“Mm.”

“He asks me a lot about you,” he mutters, so quietly that she almost misses it. She thinks she can hear the blush in his voice, too, but with the lighting, it’s hard to confirm. “Sometimes I think he wants to talk to you.”

“That’s just the ladies’ man in him talking,” she replies, a bit embarrassed that Master Assassin Ezio Auditore was curious about her. Desmond laughs.

She forgets, sometimes, that Desmond is the convergence of a bloodline that is core to the development of the Assassin order, who could talk to legends like Ezio as if they were old friends. This Desmond, this snarky, smartass bartender she got to be friends with, no longer the man she’d smuggled out of the Abstergo building, now a fighter with Altair and Ezio’s immense skill—a full Assassin… whom she intended to betray to the Templars.

Lucy stands up suddenly, almost falling off-balance at the roof’s slant. “Going already?” he comments, and she hates how calm he sounds—she wants to scream at him that she’s been lying, _she_ ’s a lie, she doesn’t deserve his stories and his laughter and his _trust_. She breathes out, and nods briefly.

“Shame,” she hears him murmur as she hangs off the edge of the roof.

 

4.

She watches him climb and clamber and fall all over the weirdly lit ledges in the Temple. His white jacket glows a ghostly blue in the dark, and the ledges blend into the background; she manages to convince herself he’s flying, flying free, able to escape from all the shit she is convinced she roped him into… and about to rope him into. When they find the Apple.

Unwelcome thoughts force into her head and she shakes her head violently. She refocuses on Desmond.

He stops at a ledge, looking around for the next one. He is crouched with his back to them, and a light shines from behind his hair to form a halo around his head. In better times, her heart would have fluttered; he looks prophetic, like he could save the world. This time she just bites her lip guiltily.

“Nice ass, Desmond,” Shaun croons, and Desmond turns back to flip him off. Shaun smirks, and Lucy thinks about how it’s not just Desmond she will give away, but Shaun and Rebecca too. She might have turned on the Brotherhood, but her cell…

The Apple rises from its chamber and she forces her doubts away. They make their way up to it, and it’s almost dreamlike, the way they do.

Desmond reaches out to it, and the next thing she knows is that there’s a knife ( _a hidden blade_ , her mind shouts) in her stomach. She looks up to see Desmond ( ** _his_** _hidden blade!_ ), and in his eyes is the same fear she saw the first time he was conscious of her, being pulled out of the Animus, terribly desynchronized with Altair. She’d hated how responsible she felt of Desmond’s life back then, managing the Animus systems and pretty much able to manipulate his vitals by tweaking things here and there. Now _he_ is responsible for her life, though not in the way she wanted.

She wonders what he sees as he’s looking at her now, and her first instinct is to ask him.

For once, she wants to stay, but she can’t.

 

5.

Her favorite place to stay is on top of Shaun’s boxes of equipment right beside the bright Temple gate, because she figures if she’s ever material again, she’ll cast a shadow and it’ll give Shaun a good scare and her a good laugh.

Since her death, she’d been following Desmond around; the first thing she was aware of was him back in the Animus, in a comatose from her death, as she’d heard from Rebecca and William. She followed them as they made their way to New York, worrying about Desmond, and finally breathing free again when he opened his eyes and said with steely resolution that he knew what to do.

She felt a pull to him, like she was compelled to see him live on. It wasn’t painful; in a sick way, she was happy to see him continue to live. The most imminent threat of them being captured by Templars was eliminated with her death.

She was happy to die, after being conflicted for so long.

However, some of her guilt remained and she carefully stays away from Desmond. In the van, she tried to be next to Rebecca as much as possible as she monitored him, because the alternative was sitting beside William. In the Temple she prefers staying on Shaun’s boxes and whiling away the time listening to him type and mutter to himself.

Desmond comes over to talk to Shaun, sometimes, when he’s taking a break from the Animus. He asks him about colonial America, which Lucy gathers is where his ancestor lives. She remembers how he would talk so passionately to her about Altair and Ezio, the little mundane things they do like Altair’s perpetual need to have clean feet or Ezio’s tic of throwing his cape over his shoulder. She longs to hear about his new ancestor too.

“I killed her, you know.”

Lucy and Shaun look up from the laptop where Shaun has been playing around with the interface for his database entries to look at Desmond, sitting where Lucy usually does. Shaun turns back to his screen. “Well, that’s what Connor does, hm? Being an Assassin and all that?”

“You know what I mean,” Desmond mutters, burying his head in his hands.

Shaun glances at him cautiously, and replies in a low voice, “It was Juno, Desmond, _not you_. You didn’t have control over yourself. Let’s just try to make sure her death means something.”

Lucy stares at Desmond, who looks like he wants to say a million things, but can’t. She tries to talk, to say she was right there, to say he could speak right now and she would hear, but no sound came out of her.

She follows him as he walks back to the Animus to sit on it. She hesitantly gets a good look at him, and sees none of the weariness she expects to see in his eyes. He’s stronger now, she thinks, he knows what he needs to do and that he can do it. He’s come so far, and she is so proud.

She instinctively puts a hand on his, and Desmond jolts. She feels his hand under hers, and he looks down at it as she runs her thumb along his, relishing the feeling of touching _something_ after so long.

Frankly, she’s surprised he hasn’t yelled out in terror--but then again, maybe he’s seen worse. He doesn’t say anything at all, and a thought occurs to her that maybe he’s been mildly aware of her presence all this time, the same way she felt a pull to him.

Rebecca walks away to move a box, and he mutters, barely moving his lips, “I hope you’re who I think you are. Altair or Ezio or Connor can’t possibly have hands this smooth… right?”

She laughs soundlessly, relishing the smile that breaks across his face and the way it makes his scar move. She leans over to kiss him, because why the hell not, and she pulls back quickly to see a mixture of incredulity and embarrassment on his face, unsure if one of his ancestors or some random dead stranger just kissed him.


End file.
